Articles

How to Improve Conference Calls and Meetings

by Rayanne M. Writer

When you have conference calls and meetings over the phone, you will want to do all that you can to improve those calls. Nothing says unprofessional like starting a business meeting out over the phone that is hard to hear or that the meeting is not organized correctly. There are many things that you can do to help improve the call or meeting.

Create An Agenda

Before you start the call, you will want to create an agenda. In that agenda should be everything that you want to cover during the call or meeting. Write down the schedule with all the participants. You can line out the agenda as to who you want to speak to and what you want to speak about. Everyone should have a copy of the agenda before the call starts.

Use A Conference Management Software

A good idea these days is to use associate conference management software. This software can handle the whole meeting for you, including allowing people to talk, muting people that do not need to talk, keeping up with time management issues, and organizing your entire plan so that everything that needs to be discussed will get discussed. Using management software can help to ensure that nothing is missed during your meeting.

Setting A Time Limit

It is a good idea if you set a time limit for your conference call. No one wants to spend hours on a call talking about irrelevant things. You should set your conference call for around twenty minutes so that everything will get done. Setting a time limit will also help keep the conversation on the topic at hand. You can assign a timekeeper to help keep everyone on track and within the time window, you have set.

Provide Accurate Dial-In Information

Far too often, people go to dial into a conference call and cannot figure out how to do it. This is especially true if they have never been on a conference call before. To avoid this, you will need to email clear step-by-step instructions for how to connect to the conference call. Your software can help you do this as well as calendar integration. Before the conference call, you should call in yourself to make sure that the lines are working as they should.

Mute Callers

It is a good idea to mute anyone who is not currently talking on the conference call. Muting other callers will help to eliminate any background noise and noise distractions. This will allow you to get everything done in your conference call that needs to be done.


Asking Questions

In advance of your conference call, you should email everyone that will be in on that call and ask them to submit any questions that they may have. At the conference call, you can answer all these questions without people having to ask them, which will save you some time.

Add Video Conferencing

You may want to consider adding video conferencing to your meeting on a conference call. This can allow for better interaction between you and the callers, and information can be spread easier. You can even activate screen sharing, so everyone can see the same thing for seeing documents, demos, videos, and more.

Choosing A Quiet Location

One of the most important things that you can do to ensure that your conference call is improved is that you need to make sure that the area you are having your call-in is quiet. Far too often, there are miscommunications on conference calls just because there is background noise that causes disruptions for the other person to hear. They may miss integral information, and things can get lost. Instead of dealing with this, make sure that you are in a quiet location with no interruptions and no background noise.

Patience

If you are dealing with a lot of callers that have never dealt with conference calls before, it can be a learning curve. You will need to have the patience to allow them time to get set up and used to the conference call system.

Using these tips, you should be able to have a great conference call or meeting the next time you have one. Just remember to have things organized, consider using a conference calling software, have patience, and make sure that you take the time to ensure that the system is working well.



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About Rayanne M. Advanced   Writer

4 connections, 4 recommendations, 289 honor points.
Joined APSense since, June 15th, 2020, From Corvallis, United States.

Created on Jun 9th 2021 14:41. Viewed 230 times.

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